Cigar Captain

Arghh the past two weeks have been quite hectic. President Obama opened peace talks with China, Dwayne Wade was pressed with law suits over business deals gone awry, and I visited the big apple!

The majestic Statue of Liberty, exhilarating Empire State Building, the stately miniature Arce de Triumphe in Washington State Park, the serenity of the Strawberry Field in Central Park, the aroma of a thousand different restaurants, the cohabitation of a million different cultures. The bustling streets. The luxury and lavishness. Nothing compares to NYC. You could see why I make it a point to visit my home town at least twice a year.

One of the highlights of this trip was the evening I spent at Times Square. Recently converted to a pedestrian mall, it was blissful to sit back in a lawn chair and watch the bedazzling light shows above, while I entered a quiet, private world where I could no longer hear the angry yells and car horns of the heavy traffic a few streets down.

In this quiet place, I remembered growing up on the streets of this city. While my upbringing spanned some of New York’s darkest decades, I recall stories my father used to tell me of the island’s golden years. Some of his best were from his earliest memories, when he was but a young boy – before even the Great Depression. He used to run down to a small barber shop on his block, where he would sit for hours at a time listening to the conversations going on; from business men to taxi drivers, old friends of his father to teenagers just out of high school – this barber shop served as a microcosm of the eclectic city in which it lay.

Stories like those make me yearn to visit those days. I am deeply saddened by the fact that I was not blessed to be born in those early days, when life was easy and a good burger cost 20 cents. When I’m feeling down about this, the only thing that can bring up my spirits is a good smoke. And what better cigar than one that looks like the old-time barber shop poles, candy-cane stripes and all.

The Felipe Gregorio Dos Capas is a masterpiece exotic blend, the culmination of years upon years of hard work and research by Felipe himself. An exclusively premium Costa Rican Piloto Cubano filler to add layers of intriguing complexity to its taste, combined with a Dominican Habana 92 binder, this full bodied cigar is a fiesta! The Barber Pole appearance of the cigar is created by the diagonally interwoven contrasting wrapper leaves, which not only give it an aesthetically-pleasing appearance, but a distinctly exciting blended taste. The expert mix of Connecticut-Sumatran wrapper with Dominican tobacco creates a silky finish that interacts deliciously with the smooth nuttiness of the tobacco inside. It really helps you forget, if just for a little, that the times we live in are not so simple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.